Rome Newsroom, Oct 27, 2022 / 04:15 am (CNA).
The Vatican revealed on Thursday a key document to guide the next stage of discussions in the Synod on Synodality.
The working document, titled “Enlarge the space of your tent,” covers issues across a broad spectrum, from the clergy sexual abuse crisis to Christian unity. The text calls for “a Church capable of radical inclusion” and says that many synod reports raised questions about the inclusion and role of women, young people, the poor, people identifying as LGBTQ, and the divorced and remarried.
The 44-page working document is officially called the DCS (Document for the Continental Stage). It summarizes the reports shared with the Vatican by bishops’ conferences, religious congregations, departments of the Roman Curia, lay movements, and other groups and individuals.
Published on Oct. 27, the document aims to be “the privileged instrument through which the dialogue of the local Churches among themselves and with the universal Church can take place during the Continental Stage.”
The text notes diverse challenges the Church faces worldwide, such as increased secularization, forced conversion and religious persecution, lack of structures for people with disabilities, and clericalism.
It identifies the celebration of the Mass, whether according to the pre-Vatican II missal or the post-Vatican II liturgy, and access to the Eucharist, as “knots of conflict” in the Church and cites a great “diversity of opinion” on the subject of priestly ordination for women, which some reports called for and others considered “a closed issue.”
“Enlarge the space of your tent” is “not a conclusive document,” but meant to spark dialogue and arouse feedback on what should be the priorities for discussion during the first session of the Synod of Bishops in October 2023.
The text will operate as an outline for the next stage of synod discussions: The Continental Assemblies, to be held on different continents between January and March 2023.
In particular, the document presents three reflection questions to which Continental Assemblies will need to respond after people have read and prayed over its content:
- Which intuitions resonate most strongly with the lived experiences and realities of the Church in your continent? Which experiences are new, or illuminating to you?
- What substantial tensions or divergences emerge as particularly important in your continent’s perspective? Consequently, what are the questions or issues that should be addressed and considered in the next steps of the process?
- Looking at what emerges from the previous two questions, what are the priorities, recurring themes, and calls to action that can be shared with other local Churches around the world and discussed during the First Session of the Synodal Assembly in October 2023?
All Catholic dioceses are asked to provide feedback on these questions. Diocesan feedback will be collected and synthesized by bishops’ conferences, who will share responses with the Continental Assembly.
The Continental Assemblies will meet between January and March 2023. According to the document, they should be made up of representatives from the entire People of God, with particular attention paid to ensuring the participation of women, young people, people living in poverty, representatives of other religions, and people with no religious affiliation.
Each Continental Assembly is required to submit a Final Document of no more than 20 pages, providing the region’s response to the three reflection questions by Mar. 31, 2023.
“Their task will be to draw up a list of priorities, upon which the First Session of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which will be held from 4 to Oct. 29 2023, will carry out their discernment,” the document says.
Bishops are also asked to meet to “collegially reread” the synod experience and validate and approve the final document produced by the Continental Assembly to ensure that it is the “fruit of an authentically synodal journey.”
The Vatican published “Enlarge the space of your tent” one year into the three-year global synodal process. Synod leadership, an advisory committee, and around 30 hand-selected people drafted the working document in September at a retreat house outside Rome in Frascati, Italy.
The continental phase of the Synod on Synodality follows the local stage, in which parishes and dioceses held listening sessions and solicited feedback from Catholics on the future of the Church. The document is filled with direct quotations from the reports sent by bishops’ conferences around the world, summarizing the feedback from the diocesan stage of the Synod on Synodality.
For example, the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference wrote in its report: “Southern Africa is also impacted by the international trends of secularization, individualization, and relativism. Issues such as the Church’s teaching on abortion, contraception, ordination of women, married clergy, celibacy, divorce and remarriage, Holy Communion, homosexuality, LGBTQIA+ were raised up across the dioceses both rural and urban. There were of course differing views on these and it is not possible to give a definitive community stance on any of these issues.”
Pope Francis recently announced his decision to extend the Synod on Synodality to 2024. Following the Continental Phase, the Synod of Bishops will meet in Rome in October 2023 and October 2024.
The feedback from the seven Continental Assemblies on the Document for the Continental Stage (DCS), will be used as the basis for another Instrumentum Laboris, or working document, that will be completed in June 2023 to guide the Synod of Bishops’ discussion.
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Of the three “reflection questions” referred to the Continental Assemblies (say what?), some hypothetical questions:
#1 “Intuition” in place of divine revelation? (Faith and Reason?)
#2 “Divergences” in place of unity? (Synodality morphed into synodism under Saul Alinski?)
#3 “Calls to action,” with the external and active virtues ranked in priority above the interior and meditative virtues? (If “Americanism” didn’t really exist, does it now?)
And, “Continental Assemblies” contaminated—as assembled incontinence? (What, then, of Apostolos Suos?) And, “enlarge the space of your tent;” first a “field hospital” and now a tent under ringmaster/big-tent revivalist Hollerich? The frontier American/Pentecostal Great Awakening (1734-) now in collar and red hat? After nearly three centuries, not much new under the sun…
Yes, there is much to be said for more of a fabric church—but when does the fabric (as a “framework”?) replace the Church as a “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium)? And when does dead-end secularist sociology replace the gifted, living, and Eucharistic Deposit of Faith?
Vatican Framework next stage, suggests stages of a continuous philosophical [ideological] process, revelation the platform for reevaluation and reinterpretation coherent to private ideation [intuitions].
A process as such is consistent with [what was previously stated by Pope Francis] an advanced pastoral rather than doctrinal exercise. The question is, What basis in revelation of the divine Word and Apostolic witness is there to subject what Christ revealed, instituted, and commanded [note, not as guidelines rather as commands] the Church to follow? Except for Francis’ stated purpose, what is there to commit the Church to the process of distancing pastoral practice from revelation? The answer is evident. None. And if there is no basis this Synodal process is illegitimate. Those who engage in support of the process as given subject themselves to illegitimacy.
Hey, Father Peter, you challenge sinodism–on what basis to upend (double entendre intended) revelation defined “not as guidelines rather as commands.” On what basis, this sort of theological transgenderism?
The answer lies (lies, an apt word!) in magisterial Holywood’s “Pirates of the Caribbean,” where pirate Barbossa clarifies: “The [pirates’] code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” As with the code, so too with the Commandments!
Postmodernism is truth! Clearly, the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit speaking through Marx, Batzing, Grech, Hollerich & Co.! Any other explanation is unthinkable. Inadmissible. Only rigid bigots could fail to see this. Butt, who am I to judge?
Time now, at this late hour, for synodality to rescue the wheat from the chaff.
Ah. When under duress, the tonic of humor.